Jafar Goodarzi’s Note on ‘Silent’ Film: Here, Hope is Like a Tightrope Walk! Trembling, Suspended, and Always on the Brink of Fall
According to CinamaDrame News Agency, Jafar Goodarzi, head of the Iranian Critics and Writers Association, wrote on his personal page:
“Bi Sar o Seda” (Silent) is the name of the film and the identity of a way of living. A title that is not only a precise choice but also the essence of the narrative: people whose voices do not reach a cry, and whose pain, silently, grinds bone by bone.
“Bi Sar o Seda” is the third work by Majid Reza Mostafavi. It is a narrative of a land seemingly lost in a vacuum; a faded geography on the outskirts of Tehran, somewhere between existence and non-existence. Its people either steal donkeys, or learn tightrope walking, or build a restaurant in the middle of the desert and nowhere, not for glory, but just to survive.
Here, hope is like a tightrope walk: trembling, suspended, and always on the brink of fall.
Siamak, the father in the film (with a detailed and silent performance by Peyman Maadi), is a man with a limp leg, whose life is always limping. He constantly tries to “get things in order”; but something is always crooked, missing, or broken.
Siamak‘s wife, with a calculated performance by Hanieh Tavassoli, with eyes always wet but tearless, is a woman who for years has seen the cracked ceiling of her house more than the sky of hope. She is neither a companion nor an enemy; she is routine itself, the frame that swallows the man, without being seen.
In her every gaze, the weariness of a generation is settled; a generation that has learned to grumble loudly, because no one hears their inner voice. She is part of the “silent” that, incidentally, needs to be heard more than anyone else.
And in their lives, their son stands; a teenager on the sharp edges of the world. On the border of childhood and adolescence, obedience and rebellion, staying and fleeing. Not just on the rooftop, but seeking balance in the midst of a society without prospects. He falls in love, gets hurt, practices to perhaps be saved, but the rope is rotten; and in this circus of life, falling is also part of the show.
The film is precise in its characterization. Everyone is wounded. Some in body, some in a bruised soul. From the different Mehran Ghafoorian, who is a desperate friend, to the circus girl and her father who seem to have come from a bygone era. The circus in this film is a metaphor for a society where a child laborer falls in love, clowns sell dreams, and those in power laugh behind the curtain, extinguishing their cigarettes on the skin of innocence.
The climax of the film’s rebellion is when Siamak, at a wedding celebration, shouts with a cracked voice: “The meat is donkey meat!”
This sentence is about cinema. It’s about what has been fed to people as film for years. And it is essentially a warning: “This is not just meat, this is an insult to taste.”
“Bi Sar o Seda” is the name of the film; but its wound will not remain silent.
